Fixing character encoding with irssi and screen

Yes, this old chestnut. Time and again I forget the steps to get a new (Debian-ish) system working properly such that I can ssh in and reattach to a screen’d irssi session and have character encoding work properly. That is, I can enter a £ sign and it doesn’t come out like I just swore at the channel.

Probably one of the simplest guides is by Salvatore Iovene, from which I summarise the following steps:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

start screen with -U

Add some options to the irssi configuration

For that last part, I think I worked out which stanza the config should go in: